As the fall festival season winds down, the temperature will be heating up next month in Durban, South Africa, where the 17th Durban FilmMart takes place from Oct. 9 – 12. This year’s event arrives amid surging hopes but lingering anxieties for an African industry at a crossroads.
For the continent’s filmmakers, there’s plenty of cause for optimism. Long marginalized or pigeonholed by festival programmers, African cinema has achieved an undeniable foothold in the main programming strands of A-class fests. Established auteurs are regularly joined on the red carpet by a rambunctious cohort of newcomers who are pushing African filmmaking in new and exhilarating directions, such as South African directors Jason Jacobs and Devon Delmar, the duo behind last year’s Rotterdam-winning docudrama “Variations on a Theme.”
The talent pipeline has never been so rich and varied. Witness Rwandan debutante Marie-Clémentine Dusabejambo taking home the Caméra d’Or in Cannes with her searing post-genocide drama “Ben’Imana” (pictured), or Nigerian directors Arie and Chuko Esiri hitting the Croisette with “Clarissa,” a Lagos-set adaptation of Virginia Woolf’s “Mrs. Dalloway,” starring Sophie Okonedo, David Oyelowo and Ayo Edebiri, that was swooped on by Neon. Venice gave its prize for best first feature to Cameroon’s Auguste Bernard Kouemo Yanghu (“House of the Wind”). Based on talent alone, the future looks undeniably bright.
More encouraging than the northbound flow of films from the Global South is the fact that financing isn’t only flowing in the opposite direction. Whereas African film production was long underwritten by European funding bodies and cultural institutions, a rash of homegrown financing tools has begun to emerge, from institutional heavyweights like the Next Narrative Africa Fund and CANEX Creations Inc. — the IP investment arm of the African Export-Import Bank — to equity investors like MBO Capital, Volition Capital and Capital Film Productions.
“For the first time in the history of African film, there are a number of equity players who are investing in film,” says Big World Cinema CEO Steven Markovitz, who alongside the African creative sector-focused HEVA Fund recently spearheaded the inaugural African Film Investor Roundtable, gathering top investors and financiers of the continent’s creative industries.
To bolster that point, Markovitz says he’s witnessed a “critical mass of equity investors” entering the market, splashing out anywhere from $100,000 to $3 million per project. “There is this moment where film is seen as a credible investment asset class,” he says. “It’s now up to us as producers to get ready for investors and start being able to understand the needs of equity investors in this environment.”
Therein, however, lies the rub. Just as the financing possibilities for African producers are flourishing, distribution channels are dwindling. After successive waves of corporate consolidation and belt-tightening that have seen global players like Prime Video, Netflix and Canal+ either exit from or scale back their investment in the African market, “the number of buyers has shrunk instead of expanding,” says Marie Lora-Mungai, founder of advisory firm Restless Global and a leading expert on Africa’s creative industries.
“There is more funding and capital than ever before…. However, the reason we are not seeing more deals, despite the sudden availability of capital, is that financiers can only invest or lend if they are reasonably convinced that the film will make its money back,” she says. “So capital is arriving into a market where demand contracted first, which is the opposite sequence to the one everybody planned for.”
If there’s a bright side, it’s that “[African] producers and film entrepreneurs aren’t sitting idle [and] are thinking outside the box to find various ways around the issue,” Lora-Mungai says. Local and regional streaming platforms are again looking for innovative ways to monetize the demand for African content, while policymakers in a number of countries are putting the creative industries front and center.
Meanwhile, financiers like CANEX Creations Inc. and initiatives like the African Producers Accelerator — launched last year by Markovitz’s Big World Cinema and the Bertha Foundation — are increasingly gearing their efforts toward curating market-ready commercial projects and pairing them with potential investors.
Taken together, such issues suggest a rich range of talking points for African industry professionals to dissect when the Durban FilmMart kicks off in its sun-splashed coastal home. Across four days, this year’s DFM should reaffirm its influential role as a rare space where representatives of the continent’s scattered screen industries can gather to discuss the challenges they face.
“We are still so separated,” says Tshepiso Chikapa Phiri, CEO of the Known Associates Group and chairperson of the Durban FilmMart Institute. “Let’s start coming together and talking about what collaboration looks like — collaboration from an infrastructure point of view, collaboration from a policy point of view, collaboration from an incentives strategy point of view.
“We need to have much more structured conversation and much more intentional conversations,” she adds. “To talk for the four days of DFM and then walk away and then meet again the following year and have the same conversations, that’s self-defeating. Talk is one thing. But the action is going to be what sets us apart.”
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